Collecting the Fry

You will find that some Guppy females tend to be cannibalistic to their young; this can sometimes be common in the Albino varieties. So you will need to be careful that you provide sufficient cover for the fry to hide when you place the female in a tank to give birth in.

The two most common methods you can use to collect the fry are:

" Breeding Traps
" Plant cover (Plastic or Real)

My own preference is to fill the tank that I place the female in to drop her young with fine leafed Plastic Plants as these can be easily sterilized after use, I use short Plants (50-75 mm) as well as ones that are long enough (250-400mm) to give cover for the fry at the surface.

The size of the tanks that I use personally is 300mm long 300mm wide and 200mm high (12inch x 12inch x 8inch) approx 6 gallons. You can use smaller tanks of half this size but I prefer the bigger tanks as I remove the female after she has dropped her litter and then use the tank to raise the fry in for the next 4 -5 weeks before I sort them out to see which if any of the fry I am going to keep as my next generation of breeders.

I find that Breeding Traps tend to stress the females and can cause premature birthing by the female, so I do not use them.

If your aim is to produce large Guppies for the show bench then the first month is crucial as to whether or not you will achieve this goal.

Assuming this is your goal and you follow the following routine you should achieve it.

Firstly you need to feed them live Baby Brine Shrimp and Bio-encapsulated (Gut Loaded) if possible this ideally needs to be fed 2 -3 times per day, on top of this a good quality dry food with a high protein and fat content.

I try and feed dry food 15 min before I feed them with the Baby Brine shrimp this is to slow the passage of the Brine Shrimp through the digestive tract of the young Guppy, this way it allows the goodness that the Bio-encapsulated Brine Shrimp gives to be digested by the Guppy.

Another way to make sure that your Guppies grow big is to raise the temperature of the tank as higher temperatures increase the metabolism of the fish so you can feed them more often. The down side is that this can shorten their lifespan.

In my opinion regular 50% water changes 2 or if possible 3 times per week is just as important in achieving good growth rate as feeding them with quality food, if you are feeding your fish lots of food then they will be producing lots of waste which will foul the water if it is not regularly diluted via water changes and stunt their growth. Even after the initial 4 weeks I still carry out 50% water changes once per week.

Once the fish reach the age of 6-8 weeks energy then starts to be diverted from body growth to the growth of the fins particularly in the males, so the first six weeks is when you need to try and maximise the body growth.